White Supremacy, White Insecurity, and the Struggle for a More Egalitarian Social Order
The purpose of law is to produce different results in the real world than would obtain in the absence of law. The purpose of criminalizing murder, for example, is to deter murder. If absent law people did not commit murder, due (say) to a universally shared moral commitment to everyone’s inalienable right to life, then…
Read MoreDemystifying Epstein
I was a 16-year-old virgin when Jeffrey Epstein first raped me. I was naive and gullible. He was a pillar of finance and a giant in the world that I was an insignificant part of. I was so impressed that this great man would even talk to me…[1] To demystify Jeffrey Epstein, he must first…
Read MoreDonald Trump and the Afrikaners
US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about white Afrikaners draws on older patterns in American conservative politics, but it also marks an important shift. In earlier periods, solidarity by American conservatives with white South Africa rested on two linked ideas: a racial logic that cast whites as uniquely capable of governing over blacks, and an anti-communist…
Read MoreEducation, Reduced
“Me! Me! Me! Me! Don’t you ever get tired of thinking about your dull, greedy, small self?” — Dave to his brother Frank, from Vincente Minnelli’s film Some Came Running, 1959 1 A Short History of America, in the Statements of Five Presidents 1941: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing Congress: “…we look forward to a world…
Read MoreHabermas’s Legacy: The Philosophy of the Public Sphere
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday March 14th, 2026, aged 96. With his passing the public lose a philosopher, social theorist and public intellectual who has arguably done more than any other to explain, protect and promote the ideals and actuality of universal morality, liberal democracy, and democratically legitimate law. He was honored…
Read MoreHabermas’s Case for Democracy: the Public Sphere, Communicative Reason and the ‘Co-originality’ of Public and Private Autonomy
Jürgen Habermas, one of the most influential philosophers of the last half-century, died last March at the age of 96. Despite his many important contributions to philosophy and social theory, he will perhaps most be remembered as a theorist of the public sphere. This was the topic of his first book, The Structural Transformation of…
Read MoreJürgen Habermas’s Image of the United States as a Model of “Modernity”: From Attachment to Melancholy
“it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. […] one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.” – Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy” Early Frankfurt…
Read Morea centenary of
Allen Ginsberg was put on this planet to speak eternal truths in a sexy new radiance that linger in these walls and echo to our souls Today is the beginning of our studies Politics are ever more blinding He spoke of the all-seeing eye that dissolves AI He sang the glory of William Blake in…
Read MoreDeath Power Blues
Allen is asking me about my dream within, again. Why so demanded? “A group called women. A group of women, some saying, walk away.” I hate the impunity of markers. Rust in the line frightened and bind hounded and bound this time: taxonomies games of blades thrashing, thrusting invasion, migration the scribe in the…
Read MoreMy Discovery of Howl
_______ In the fall of 1957, I began visiting the student bookstore at the University of Missouri where the table with books of the Beat Generation, buoyed by the victory in San Francisco from the Howl trial, changed the course of my life. I purchased Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, mostly because of…
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